A Manual Aston Martin Vantage Is Happening But A V12 Is Unlikely

Given that it’s supposed to be the sportier brother to the DB11, you’d be forgiven for wondering why the new Aston Martin Vantage has a regular torque converter automatic gearbox from ZF. Particularly when the company from which its V8 engine is borrowed - Mercedes-AMG - makes a brutally efficient seven-speed dual-clutch.

It’s partly down to smoothness, Aston Martin Chief Engineer Matt Becker explained to us at the launch of the car in Portugal this month. “The auto gives you a better blend of normal use and track use; DCTs at low speeds can be a little bit shunty,” he said. Taking Andy Palmer’s learnings from his Nissan days: “with the GT-R you get a lot of complaints about dual-clutch in certain markets,” he added.

The other factor is cost - the development work for mating the 4.0-litre AMG engine with a ZF auto on a transaxle has already been done for the DB11 V8, after all. “The investment for that [a DCT] would be huge,…If we’d have gone dual clutch we wouldn’t have done a manual,” he said. Yep, that’s right, a Vantage manual is definitely happening, with a seven-speed stick shift version joining the range next year.

But what about a V12? Is there a place for that in the line-up? It’s technically possible but probably won’t happen, and it’s all to do with the weight of Aston Martin’s new 5.2-litre twin-turbo unit relative to the AMG-sourced V8. “It will fit, but there are no plans at the moment,” Becker said, adding, “It’s 100kg heavier, and you have to think about this engine [the V8] - 500bhp is not the limit of this engine. You’ve got E63s with over 600bhp.”

With that in mind, you’d have to crank up that V12 - which makes 600bhp in the DB11 - to a particularly ridiculous power figure just to make fitting it worthwhile. Becker brands the possibility of such a car “unlikely,” but didn’t rule it out entirely for the future. “We have a special vehicle operations team that do things like [Vantage] GT12s and GT8s, so it is possible that they may want to do something like that in the future, just a limited run,” he said.